In era of court challenges to affirmative action, experts debate how to achieve campus diversity

BY JOHN SANFORD

Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, proposed changing affirmative action to consider class instead of race in college-admission decisions.

Glenn Loury, a professor of economics at Boston University, argued that race-blind admissions policies that nevertheless count racial diversity as their goal may be more problematic than race-specific policies.

Pamela Karlan, a Stanford professor of law, asserted that attaining racial diversity by admitting the top percentile of high-school classes only works if those high schools are racially segregated.

Speaking on the panel on affirmative action were Richard Kahlenberg, senior fellow at The Century Foundation; Glenn C. Loury, economics professor at Boston University; and Stanford law Professor Pam Karlan. Photo: L.A. Cicero

Kahlenberg, Loury and Karlan were three of six panelists who addressed the controversial topic of race-based college admissions Friday in the Terrace Room of Margaret Jacks Hall. Sponsored by the Ethics in Society Program and by the Stanford Center on Ethics, "Diverse Approaches to Affirmative Action" attracted a sizable audience that included, during the first session, President John Hennessy and Dean of Admission Robin Mamlet.

Race vs. Class

Kahlenberg, the author of The Remedy: Class, Race, and Affirmative Action (1996), argued that not only would economic affirmative action promote meritocracy but economic and racial diversity, as well. Under such a system, admission officers would consider factors such as the income of an applicant's parents, their occupation and their education, as well as whether the applicant grew up in a poor neighborhood and attended a poor school.

"If you go to the top 146 colleges [as defined by Barron's college guides], you're 25 times as likely to run into a rich kid as a poor kid," he said. "This is something that we don't really talk about in the affirmative action debate, but to me it's a scandalous statistic."

If these colleges accepted students based solely on grades and test scores, the number of Latino and African American students would drop significantly, Kahlenberg said, citing a 1995 study. If, however, a system of economic affirmative action were implemented, the number of blacks and Latinos would decline from just 12 percent to 10 percent, he said. Meanwhile, the representation of economically disadvantaged kids would rocket from 10 percent to 38 percent.

Kahlenberg said that the 2 percent drop in black and Latino representation was unacceptable and proposed including other race-neutral factors to raise racial diversity, such as neighborhood poverty.

Ill-conceived policy

Over the past 15 years, Loury, director of the Institute on Race and Social Division at Boston University, has shifted from largely disapproving of race-conscious affirmative-action programs to largely approving of them.

He began his talk Friday by drawing a distinction between "race-blind" and "race-neutral" policies: Race-blindness involves making a decision without consideration of a person's race; race-neutrality means having no stake in the racial outcome of a process. However, he said that most "race-blind" or "colorblind" programs are not meant to be race-neutral; that is, even though these programs aim to tiptoe around prohibitions on racial considerations, they still try to achieve a racial goal. For example, the Texas Legislature has passed a law guaranteeing admission to the University of Texas for students in the top 10 percent of their high school classes, with one of the goals being racial diversity. But tactics that attempt to circumvent bans on race-conscious admissions can be messier and more inefficient than simply acknowledging race as a factor, he said.

"Given that our goals include a racial outcome, our means ought to also include racial information," he said.

Assuming that colleges are looking for "the best" students, a policy that calls for taking the top 10 percent of high-school students can be problematic, he said. (He used what he acknowledged was a "simple and controversial" definition of "best": Those students forecast by admissions officers to do the best academically once they are enrolled at the university.)

The Texas lawmakers who created the 10-percent rule essentially forced the University of Texas to retool its admissions formula, which, presumably, initially had been designed to admit the best students while also taking into consideration the race of a small minority of them. Now, however, the university will accept some students who they previously would have rejected, regardless of race. This is an inefficiency "because we have excluded some students who we forecast to do better than some of the students we are including," Loury said.

However, a program that targets a relatively small minority for racial preferences would only be compromising its standards to the smallest possible degree, he said.

Another problem with using such indirect means to attain racial diversity is that they can "send the wrong market signal to students about the relative importance" of traits that the college has determined will make them academically successful, he said. For example, students may decide to boost their grade-point averages by taking easy classes -- or even attending less competitive high schools -- so they have little trouble making it into the top 10 percent of their graduating class.

For judges, appearance counts

Karlan, the Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Professor of Public Interest Law, said that the only reason the Texas 10-percent plan works is that high schools in the state are largely segregated. Such a plan wouldn't work at the level of elite professional schools "because virtually none of that pool of students attend overwhelmingly black or Latino institutions of higher education," she added. "Most attend racially integrated institutions."

She also argued that such "colorblind" programs could end up running afoul of the Constitution anyway. She gave the example of a case, Guinn & Beal v. United States, which involved a 1910 amendment to the Oklahoma Constitution permitting citizens to vote only if they could read or had been able to vote (or had ancestors who were able to vote) on Jan. 1, 1866. That date was picked, of course, because it preceded the passage of the 15th Amendment, which ensured citizens the right to vote, Karlan said. The Supreme Court struck the clause down, recognizing that it was attempting to keep blacks from voting. Yet the clause was, technically, race blind.

Similarly, the Texas 10-percent law is vulnerable because it has "race as its purpose every bit as much" as the Oklahoma clause, Karlan said.

"Now, I don't think the Supreme Court will have the courage or the convictions to strike this plan down, because I think they care very much about the appearance of things as well as the reality," Karlan said. "But if you take constitutional law seriously, these plans have the same constitutional problem that the plans they replace did. Moreover, the more you have to tweak these plans to get the racial result you want, the more constitutionally vulnerable they become."

Echoing a point made by the late Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, for whom she clerked, Karlan concluded by saying that "sometimes in order to get beyond race, you have to take race into account."